#use wml::debian::projectnews::header PUBDATE="2010-10-04" SUMMARY="Constant Usable Testing, Bits from FTP Team, Google Summer of Code, Bits from the Publicity Team"
#use wml::debian::acronyms
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Copyright (c) 2010 Jeremiah C. Foster
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<a name="0"></a>
<p>Welcome to this year's thirteenth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the
Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="#1">Constantly Usable Testing (CUT) update</a></li>
<li><a href="#2">Bits from the FTP Team</a></li>
<li><a href="#3">Resume about this years <q>Google Summer of Code</a></li>
<li><a href="#4">Bits from the Publicity Team</a></li>
<li><a href="#5">... and much more</a>.</li>
</ul>
<a name="1"></a>
<h2>An update on Constantly Usable Testing (CUT)</h2>
<p>Rahpa&euml;l Hertzog wrote a
detailed article on the <a
href="http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/406301/e28612e7adae5653/&quot;>recent
activity surrounding the Constantly Usable Testing (CUT)
proposal</a>. CUT is a Debian distribution based on testing, but with
significant differences that make it more usable, i.e. more polished
and stable. In the article he talks about the potential use of a
<q>rolling</q> release and how that might work.<br> A quote from the article:
<q>The global proposal is certainly appealing: it would address the
concerns of obsolescence of Debian's stable release by making
intermediary releases. Anyone needing something more recent for
hardware support can start by installing a cut and follow the
subsequent releases until the next stable version. And users who
always want the latest version of all software could use rolling after
having installed a cut.</q></p>
<p>
CUT seems to represent an innovative evolution of Debian
distributions. While it holds much promise, it is a lot of work
especially since there is already so much work getting a stable
release actually released. There always seems to be a tension between
having a rock solid stable release, which many people rely on Debian
to provide, and a developer's toolkit with cutting edge programming
languages and libraries. Perhaps CUT can address this.
</p>
<p>
Please see also the current discussion on the <a
href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/cut-team/2010-September/000152.html&quot;>cut
team mailing list</a>.
</p>
<a name="2"></a>
<h2>Bits from the FTPMasters</h2>
<p>The previous
weekend in Fulda, Germany the FTP Team met. While there appeared to
be a shortage of Baklava, there was no shortage of Debian related work
and discussion. J&ouml;rg Jaspert mentions in the meeting minutes that
there is a new FTPMaster; Torsten Werner. J&ouml;rg also made a call for
volunteers. Being an FTPMaster is a hard job and one that many people
inside and outside of Debian take for granted. I'm sure I speak for
more than just myself when I say thanks very much for the hard work
FTPMasters.</p>
<p>He also mentioned that <q>starting with squeeze, the
volatile suites will be integrated into the normal ftp.debian.org
mirror tree. This weekend we enabled squeeze-volatile on ftp-master
and setup the needed scripts so that the volatile team can fill it
with packages whenever needed. Please note that the general
handling of volatile starting with squeeze is now different to the
way volatile worked in the past. All packages now have to pass
stable's proposed-updates queue before going into volatile.</q>
</p>
<p>Joerg goes on to discuss a number of important topics - I suggest
you read his mail, it is quite detailed and has lots of valuable
information - including the discussion of using a version control
system to <q>push</q> entire repositories to the ftp-master.
</p>
<p>
Further details on the <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2010/09/msg00139.html&quot;>
Debian Project mailing list.</a></p>
<a name="3"></a>
<h2>Resume about this years <q>Google Summer of Code</q></h2>
<p>Obey Arthur Liu wrote a <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/4C972B40.3080903@milliways.fr&quot;>report about Debian's participation in this
years <q>Google Summer of Code</q></a>, where Google pays student to work on
and with specific FLOSS projects. Debian was accepted as mentoring
organisation for the fourth time in a row. Again it was a great success
with eight students completing their projects sucesfull. He also quoted
some of the student's project reports.</p>
<p>The project ranged <q>Hurd port and de-Linux-ization of
Debian-Installer</q> over <q>Debbugs Bug Reporting and Manipulation API</q>
and <q>Aptitude Qt</q> up to <q>Debian-Installer on Neo FreeRunner and
Handheld Devices</q>. You can find more details in <a
href="http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc&quot;>Debian's wiki</a>.</p>
<a name="4"></a>
<h2>Bits from the Publicity Team</h2>
<p>Debian's Publicity Team posted <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/20100914103636.GS12469@melusine.alphascorpii.net&quot;>some
bits</a> informing the Debian Developers, Contributors and the Community
how best to get it contact with them and especially how to help.
Helping the team may range from helping with the Debian Project News (you
do want to continue reading them, do you?), propose <q>dents</q> for
Debian's offical <a href="http://identi.ca/debian ">identi.ca account</a>
or be available for <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/ThisWeekInDebian&quot;>This
Week in Debian</a> podcast.</p>
<a name="5"></a>
<h2>Other news</h2>
<p>Joey Hess was quite pleased, to see some of his tools being referenced
<a href="http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/MovieOS_credit/&quot;>in a recent
movie</a>.</p>
<p>Russell Coker create a <a href="http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/09/20/my-squeeze-se-linux-repository/&quot;>package repository for packages fixing SELinux
related bugs</a> for Debian <q>Squeeze</q>.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.debian.org/ports/hppa/&quot;>PA-RISC (aka
<q>hppa</q>)</a> architecture has been <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/1285100542.20782.1123.camel@kaa.jungle.aubergine.my-net-space.net&quot;>droped
as release architecure</a> for Debian 6.0 <q>Squeeze</q>. It will still be
available in Debian's <q>unstable</q> suite.</p>
<p>Thomas Lange <a href="http://news.debian.net/2010/09/28/fai-home-has-moved/&quot;>announced</a>
the FAI project got its domain at <a href="http://fai-project.org/&quot;>
http://fai-project.org/</a> and all services (wiki, repositories) have been
migrated to use the new domain. </p>
<p>Release Assistant Mehdi Dogguy announced the agenda of an upcoming <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/4C9A5C3F.2080805@debian.org&quot;>meeting of the
Release Team</a>. One point on their agenda: <q>Check the state of
Squeeze</q>.</p>
<p>Continueng his blogs about how the annual Debian Conference is
organised, Richards Darst covered recently the topics <a
href="http://www.debian-administration.org/users/rkd/weblog/10&quot;>The DebConf
travel sponsorship process</a> and <a
href="http://www.debian-administration.org/users/rkd/weblog/9&quot;>How DebCamp
relates to DebConf</a>. And Joey Hess gave some historical background in
his <a
href="http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/DebCamp_origin_story/&quot;>DebCamp
origin story</a>.</p>
<p>Luca Bruno posted a <a href="http://kaeso.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/report-from-the-debianubuntu-community-conference-ita-2010/&quot;>Report from the Debian/Ubuntu Community
Conference, ITA 2010</a>. As this was the first italian event organised by
both communities, he hilights: <q>This new kind of collaboration between
our communities was found to be really positive and more events has already
been drafted for the next year, including a translation sprint and a
contributors meeting.</q></p>
<p>Holger Levsen announced the availability of the first release candidate
of an updated <a
href="http://lists.debian.org/201009291835.31081.holger@layer-acht.org&quot;>Debian
Edu Lenny</a> version. One of the most important features is an update of
the installer based upon the debian-installer used in Debian 5.0.6
<q>Lenny</q> adding newer hardware support.</p>
<a name="6"></a>
<h2>New Debian Contributors</h2>
<p>
3 people <a href="http://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/new-maintainers.cgi&quot;>started
to maintain packages</a> since the previous issue of the Debian
Project News. Please welcome
Dimitrios Eftaxiopoulos, Pierre-Louis Bonicoli, and Hector Romojaro
into our project!</p>
<a name="7"></a>
<h2>Release-critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release</h2>
<p>According to the <a
href="http://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi&quot;>Bug webinterface of the
Universal Debian Database</a>, the upcoming release,
Debian 6.0 <q>Squeeze</q>, is currently affected by
301 release-critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved
or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about
177 release-critical bugs remain to be solved for the
release to happen.</p>
<p>There are also <a
href="http://blog.schmehl.info/Debian/rc-stats/#2010-39&quot;>more detailed
statistics</a> as well as some <a
href="http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/RC-Stats&quot;>hints on how to
interpret</a> these numbers.</p>
<p>These statistics have recently been moved to a new data source, and are
not comparable with the statistics of the last issue. Please read <a
href="http://blog.schmehl.info/2010/09/24#2010-38-2&quot;>Alexanders blog</a>
for more details.</p>
<a name="8"></a>
<h2>Important Debian Security Advisories</h2>
<p>Debian's Security Team recently released
advisories for these packages (among others):
<a href="http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2114&quot;>git-core</a>,
<a href="http://www.debian.org/security/2010/dsa-2115&quot;>moodle</a>,
Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.</p>
<p>Please note that these are a selection of the more important security
advisories of the last weeks. If you need to be kept up to date about
security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please
subscribe to the <a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/&quot;>security mailing
list</a> for announcements.</p>
<a name="9"></a>
<h2>New and noteworthy packages</h2>
<p>The following packages were added to the unstable Debian archive
recently (<a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg&quot;>among
others</a>):</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/dkopp&quot;>dkopp &mdash; Full and incremental backup to DVD</a></li>
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/input-pad&quot;>input-pad &mdash; On-screen Input Pad to Send Characters with Mouse</a></li>
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/live-manual-html&quot;>live-manual-html &mdash; Debian Live - Documentation (html)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/live-manual-pdf&quot;>live-manual-pdf &mdash; Debian Live - Documentation (pdf)</a></li>
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/postgresql-9.0&quot;>postgresql-9.0 &mdash; object-relational SQL database, version 9.0 server</a></li>
<li><a href="http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/strongswan&quot;>strongswan &mdash; IPsec VPN solution metapackage</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Please note that due to the <a
href="http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100806&quot;>freeze of the upcoming
Debian 6.0 <q>Squeeze</q></a> acceptance of new packages has almost ceased.</p>
<a name="10"></a>
<h2>Work-needing packages</h2>
<p>Currently
492 packages are orphaned and
129 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look at the
<a href="http://lists.debian.org/E1OtrU0-0004uy-P4@merkel.debian.org&quot;>recent</a>
<a href="http://lists.debian.org/E1OwOon-0006iP-9v@merkel.debian.org&quot;>reports</a>
to see if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete
list of <a href="http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/help_requested&quot;>packages
which need your help</a>.</p>
<a name="11"></a>
<h2>Want to continue reading DPN?</h2>
<p>Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers
to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the
<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute&quot;>contributing
page</a> to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail
at <a href="mailto:debian-publicity@lists.debian.org&quot;>debian-publicity@lists.debian.org</a>.</p>
#use wml::debian::projectnews::footer editor="Jeremiah C. Foster, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl"
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